Rag Linen | Online Museum of Historic Newspapers

Stamp duty. When these two words touched American soil in April 1764 — as a teaser of the internal tax coming after the Sugar Act — they set in motion a chain of events that forever altered the course of American history.  One ripple effect was the formation of the Sons of Liberty.

To some, Sons of Liberty was a generic label for any opponent of the stamp tax.  To others, including Pauline Maier, professor of American history at MIT and scholar of the American Revolution, it was an intercolonial network of organized resistance groups that eventually evolved from structured resistance into revolution.

As Maier wrote in From Resistance to Revolution (1992), “the idea of regularizing intercolonial cooperation against the Stamp Act sprang up independently in several widely separated colonies, but the most intense organizational effort began and remained centered in New York. It was there on either October 31 or November 6 [1765; the Stamp Act went into effect on November 1, 1765] that a meeting of some type appointed a committee to correspond with the other colonies.”

From November 1765 through March 1766, New York’s organized resistance aligned and opened communication channels with Philadelphia, New London, Boston, rural Massachusetts, Albany, Portsmouth, Newport, New Brunswick, Baltimore, Annapolis, Norfolk, etc.  According to Maier, by March  1766, the Sons of Liberty were an intercolonial network of great significance. “The emergence of organized local resistance groups and their often simultaneous merger into an intercolonial organization of a new type and significance began only in the closing months of 1765, and never really caught on until February 1766.”

To highlight the Sons’ early days of formal existence and cross-colonial communication, Rag Linen uncovered a few key colonial newspaper reports, which are pictured below (click images to enlarge). These pieces have also published as a permanent Rag Linen collection.

1. First row: Supplement to the Boston Gazette — January 27, 1766*
2. Second row: Boston Gazette – February 17, 1766**
3. Third row: Pennsylvania Gazette — March 20, 1766 (1)*** and Boston Gazette — May 21, 1770 (2, 3;  printed two and a half months after the Boston Massacre)****

*Featured in the first row are full-page pictures of the Supplement to the Boston Gazette for January 27, 1766, which include several exciting early details about the Sons of Liberty, such as their first meeting in Savannah, Georgia, at Machenry’s tavern.

**Of particular note is the third image in the second row from the February 17, 1766 Boston Gazette. Under the headline “Portsmouth, Feb 10″ is a report of the Sons’ letter from New York, Connecticut and Boston reaching New Hampshire.

***Another great clip is the first image of the third row from the March 20, 1766 Pennsylvania Gazette. Under the headline “Annapolis, March 6″ is a report of the inaugural Sons of Liberty meeting in the Maryland capital.

****The last image of the third row is from the May 21, 1770 Boston Gazette. It highlights a local meeting of the Daughters of Liberty.

The Print Shop at Colonial Williamsburg

Colonial newspapers are unsung heroes of the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War. Specifically, several newspapermen and women deserve recognition for their role in America’s founding, including:

• Benjamin Edes and John Gill, Boston Gazette
• Isaiah Thomas, Massachusetts Spy
• William Goddard, Pennsylvania Chronicle
• Peter Timothy, South Carolina Gazette
• Thomas Green, Connecticut Courant
• John Holt, New York Journal
• Solomon Southwick, Newport Mercury
• William Gradford III, Pennsylvania Journal
• Mary Goddard, Maryland Journal
• Anne Catharine Green, Maryland Gazette
• James Rivington, Royal Gazette
• Paul Revere, engraver for colonial newspapers (e.g., Massachusetts Spy and Boston Gazette)

One author who recognizes the revolutionary role of newspapers, and their printers and journalists, is Eric Burns, author of Infamous Scribblers (2006).

Marrying the story-telling flair of McCullough with the journalism history acumen of Mott and Emery, Burns says that the Boston Gazette, arguably the most influential newspaper the country has ever known, got us into the Revolutionary War, sped up the course of the war and may have even determined the outcome of the war. And a good chunk of Infamous Scribblers is dedicated to supporting this thesis.

As Burns admits, “Perhaps the importance of the press to the outcome of the war can be exaggerated, but not easily and not by much. It was newspapers that kept the colonies informed of the progress of the fighting in a way that letters and patterers could not have done, and in the process united the colonies in a way that was beyond the ability of the jerry-built wartime government.”

Burns points out that newspapers were the only form of media at the time and served as the great unifier of our nation during a time when America “needed unity as much as we needed ammunition.”

Below are a few other highlights from Infamous Scribblers:

On reporting and publishing during the Revolutionary War: “The Revolutionary War was not an easy one to cover. For one thing, once the fighting started there was more news than ever but no more shipments of ink or type or spare parts for the presses coming into American ports. There were no more shipments of paper either, and, as for the quantities still available or smuggled into the colonies from a friend in the motherland or a trader in another European nation, there were higher priorities for it than journalism.”

On a newspaper’s role in the Revolutionary War: “It was Franklin, though, who most succinctly and accurately assessed the role of the media in the days leading up to the war. It was he, astute as ever, who pointed out that the press not only can ’strike while the iron is hot,’ but it can ‘heat it by continually striking.’”

On an unlikely spy embedded as a printer: “Jemmy [James] Rivington’s Tory newspaper, the Royal Gazette, was extremely critical of George Washington. However, Rivington was also a spy who passed along secrets of the British navy to colonial leaders. On one occasion, Rivington helped break a British code that almost surely saved American lives during one of the war’s earlier battles.” Read the Rag Linen blog post on this topic.

Additional resources on the role and significance of colonial printers during the American Revolution:

• Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (Arthur Schlesinger, 1958)
• Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (Eric Burns, 2006)
• Back Issues: The Day the Newspaper Died (Jill Lepore, 2009)
• Boston 1775: Edes and Gill (J. L. Bell, 2006-2010)
• Rag Linen Collections: The Stamp Act of 1765 and 1776

Below is the presentation Eric Burns gave at a book store in Washington, DC, which aired on C-SPAN.

If a finger had to be pointed at one person for causing the American Revolutionary War, a strong case can be made for pointing it at Thomas Hutchinson.

According to the Origins of the American Revolution by Andrew Stephen Walmsley (1999):

Rarely in American history has a political figure been so pilloried and despised by his contemporaries as Thomas Hutchinson… Vilified, stigmatized, and ridiculed, he eventually became the pre-eminent bete noire or scapegoat of America’s most vigorous radical activists. By 1774 he was arguably the most unpopular man in North America. His name had become synonymous in the popular imagination with detested loyalism, hated toryism and treason… One of the greatest challenges to confront Massachusetts’ radicals throughout the years of imperial crisis was to develop an effective formula for ousting Hutchinson. Without him as their foil, Boston’s radicals would have had a far more difficult time engineering the crisis that produced the Revolution.

The Hutchinson letters affair was one of the most famous controversies tied to Hutchinson, as well as Benjamin Franklin. The Hutchinson letters that Franklin leaked to his friend in Boston were eventually published in June 1773 in the Boston Gazette. Likely used as war propaganda, the New-England Chronicle republished the Hutchinson letters in June and July of 1775 — click here to read some of the Thomas Hutchinson letters printed in the June 29 to July 6, 1775 issue of the New-England Chronicle.

Equally interesting about the Hutchinson letters affair is the Benjamin Franklin confession (but no apology).  According to Walter Isaacson’s biography on Franklin:

In December, two men engaged in an inconclusive duel in Hyde Park after one accused the other of leaking the letters.  When a rematch seemed imminent, Franklin felt he had to step forward… he wrote… a letter to the London Chronicle on Christmas Day (published December 27). But he did not apologize.

Franklin’s public confession led to his appearance before the Privy Council, which many historians point to as the moment when Franklin officially stopped supporting Britain and became an American revolutionary.

Below is Benjamin Franklin’s public confession to leaking the Hutchinson letters as published in the March 7, 1774 Boston Gazette.

Paul Revere’s engraving of Boston’s “Bloody Massacre” is one of his most well known works. As of this posting, more than 60 percent of the Google image results for “Paul Revere engraving” return his engraved depiction of the Boston Massacre.

A lesser known engraving by Revere is his patriotic response to the Stamp Act, titled “A View of the Year 1765“. An advertisement for Revere’s 1765 political cartoon was published in the January 27, 1766 issue of the Boston Gazette (see original ad below). Contextual background on this Revere engraving and the January 27, 1766 Boston Gazette can be found on page 48 and 49 of A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere (Triber, 2001).